Name Thomas Kraabel | ||
A. Thomas Kraabel, a Biblical archeologist, is known for being Qualley Professor of Classics and then vice-President of Luther College.
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Biography
He was born in Portland, Oregon on November 4, 1934 and attended schools in Oregon, Minnesota, and California. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in Oakland, California and th majored in classical languages and literature at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Following completion of the B. A. degree in 1956, he continued the study of classics at the University of Iowa with the support of a Danforth Graduate Fellowship, earning the Master of Arts degree in 1958.
From 1958 to 1961, he studied theology at Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. After completing his B. Th. degree in 1961, he was ordained as a Lutheran pastor and served as assistant pastor of Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Minneapolis for two years.
In 1963 he entered a doctoral program in New Testament and Early Christian literature at Harvard Divinity School, receiving a Th. D. degree in 1968. While working on that degree he received a Rockefeller Doctoral Fellowship in Religion and the Harvard Divinity School’s Pfeiffer Fellowship in Archaeology. He also served as assistant in Greek and lecturer in New Testament at Episcopal Theological Seminary, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1966-1967.
Academic work
During his study at Harvard, Kraabel developed a special interest in Hellenistic Judaism. Research topics centered on the character of Judaism in the Roman Empire and its relevance for the understanding and description of early Christianity, and he served e as research assistant to Erwin R. Goodenough, a distinguished scholar in that area. The interest continued in his experience as a field archaeologist, in 1966, for the Harvard-Cornell Archaeological Exploration of the site of ancient Sardis in Turkey. The ancient synagogue at that site became a major topic of his research during and after his field experience.
In the fall of 1967 Kraabel became a member of the faculty of the Department of Classics at the University of Minnesota. He held the rank of full professor in that department from 1976 to 1982, including three years as chairman of the department from 1978 to 1981. He also served as chairman of religious studies from 1969 to 1976. He spent the academic year 1977-1978 as a visiting fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford University, England, and some months in 1981 as a visiting fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.
In January 1983 Luther College named Kraabel vice-president and dean of the college, as well as professor of religion and classics. He continued in this position through the 1995-1996 academic year; he then taught religion and classics at the college until his retirement at the end of the 1999-2000 academic year. The college named him in 1988 to an endowed chair, Qualley Professor of Classics, a position he occupied until his retirement.
From 1969 to 1973 he was associate director, with Eric Meyers of Duke University, of the Joint Expedition to Khirbet Shema’, Israel, an archaeological project of the American Schools of Oriental Research.